Video: Rendering your first animation

If you're new to animation, you might not be familiar with the terms render or rendering. I like to think of the word render as a fancy word for output. See, when you complete a project inside of After Effects, it's just that, inside of After Effects. Most of the time, you'll want to create some kind of self-contained file outside of After Effects, so you can watch it later like in a QuickTime Player or Windows Media Player. It's important to note that After Effects can create all kinds of files.

In this course, author Ian Robinson introduces Adobe After Effects CS6 and the world of animation, effects, and compositing. Chapter 1 introduces the six foundations of After Effects, which include concepts like layers, keyframes, rendering, and moving in 3D space. The rest of the course expands on these ideas, and shows how to build compositions with layers, perform rotoscoping, animate your composition with keyframes, add effects and transitions, and render and export the finished piece. Two real-world example projects demonstrate keying green screen footage and creating an advanced 3D composition with the expanded 3D toolset, an important addition to CS6.

Topics include:

Setting up the workspace, important preferences, and the cache

Importing footage and comps

Relinking missing footage

Creating type, shape layers, and masks

Rotoscoping with the Roto Brush

Adjusting keyframes in the Graph Editor

Timing animations to audio

Building backgrounds with effects

Rendering with the Render Queue and Adobe Media Encoder

Animating 3D type

Smoothing shaky footage and retouching footage

Keying green screen footage

Working with 3D: extruding shapes, adding ray-traced lighting, and more

Rendering your first animation

If you're new to animation, you might not be familiar with the terms render or rendering.I like to think of the word render as a fancy word for output.See, when you complete a project inside of After Effects, it's just that,inside of After Effects.Most of the time, you'll want to create some kind of self-contained file outsideof After Effects, so you can watch it later like in a QuickTime Player orWindows Media Player.It's important to note that After Effects can create all kinds of files.

They don't always have to be video files.You can create still files like JPEG or Photoshop documents.In this video, I'll show you how to render your composition at full resolution.To get started, let's make sure we have our Logo_Animation composition open.When you go to create a render, you want to make sure that you have thecomposition open that you're going to render.It seems pretty straight forward, right?Now the next thing you want to pay attention to is the playback range.See, when you scrub through a project or you're working on specific sections,you may have hit N to shorten your playback range so you would have a quickpreview in your RAM Preview.

But when you actually go to render this, After Effects will default torendering the work area.So a lot of times, if you just want to output the extended comp, there is aswitch for that, that you can change, but I like to just sort of be aware of thework area before I create my movie.A quick way of dealing with that, if you press End on your keyboard, thatwill automatically move your playhead to the end of the timeline as long asthe timeline is active;see with this yellow line.Now after pressing End on the keyboard, I can press N to reset my out pointof my playback range.

Now when I'm ready to make my movie, I can go up to Composition and chooseAdd to Render Queue.That will pop up the Render Queue.The default location for the Render Queue is down here in the timeline area.I personally like to move it up into the comp area.So I'm just going to click and drag on these little grippy dots right here.If you click and drag up, I'm going to drag up and tell I get this darkpurple line at the top.Now when I let go, you can see my Render Queue is dead center right in themiddle of my composition.

I can go to my Render Settings to set up my configuration.First thing, if you want to render something full resolution, Best Setting isprobably the best way to leave it.I like clicking on the words for Best Setting, so you can see everythinglike I'm going to render it at the Best Quality at Full Resolution at the size 1280x720.Remember what I said about the Preview Range or the Work Area Duration?This is where that would pop up.And in the pulldown menu here, notice under Time Span, it's set to defaultto the Work Area Only.

Now since we reset the work area for the entire length of the comp, notice it'sgoing to start here and end at 09:23, giving us the full 10 seconds of duration.You can choose to render a specific area just by clicking the Custom button, andthis is where you can tell it, you know, I only want to render 5 seconds or 3seconds, or what have you.I'm just going to press Cancel because I do want to render the full thing at Full Quality.When I click OK, my Render Settings are set for the size, and how long of aclip I'm going to make.

The Output Module will help me determine exactly what kind of file I'm going to create.If I click this pulldown button here, you notice I have a bunch of Presets that I could use.When you first get started, I recommend not using those Presets, but literallyjust clicking on the word Lossless, because then, I can make some adjustmentsunder the Output Module.So my default, since I'm on a Mac, is QuickTime.But, if you click on that, you could choose any of the other options likea Photoshop Sequence, or a TIFF Sequence, or H.264 if you're trying tocreate a really tiny file.

I'll just click off of that window, leave it set to QuickTime, and in theVideo Output section, this button right here for Format Options, this allowsme to specify the codec.I'm going to click that button, and probably leave it the Animation codec.I like using Animation because that is a full resolution lossless compression.And especially when you're dealing with motion graphics, it's important that youdon't compress or over-compress your animation.

You can click on the Animation pulldown and choose any of these other codecs.Another good choice are these Avid DNxHD Codecs.And finally, for you Apple folks, the Apple ProRes codec is pretty decent as well.But I recommend leaving it Animation, and leaving the settings at 100%Quality, and clicking OK.If we had audio in our project, this is where we could select audio for theoutput, but since we don't, I'll just leave that deselected.

When we click OK, we're actually ready to render our project.But let's look at where this file is going to be created on my computer.Click on the words Logo_Animation, and here, this is where I can specify exactlywhat I want to name the QuickTime file I'm now creating.I'll leave it set for Logo_Animation, but just add _FullRes to the end of it,and notice where it's actually going to save the file.Now typically when I work, I have another folder that I use to save my video files in.

So for now, I'm just going to render right to the Desktop, and click Save. All right,now there's one more thing I want to mention before we hit Render, and that hasto do with the Animation codec.Typically, when you render graphics, you want to use something that'suncompressed and that's why I chose the Animation codec.It is a lossless compression, so it is compressed but it won't degrade thequality as I mentioned earlier.But it also creates extraordinarily large files.So if you don't have a particularly fast hard-drive or a lot of RAM on yourcomputer, you may not be able to play back the Animation QuickTimes at fullresolution off your hard-drive, again because it's fully uncompressed.

If you just want to preview or share your QuickTime with somebody else to see, Irecommend maybe rendering in H.264 video.Again, we rendered Animation because if I were to send this to a video editor, Iwould want it to come in at as high quality as possible. All right,now we're ready to go ahead and hit Render.Now when you click Render, you'll get a preview as to how long it's taking uphere in the top with the progress bar that's loading.Now there's one other thing, when your project is rendering, you can expand theCurrent Render triangle here, and see exactly what's rendering when.

That way, if you notice something is hanging up as it's rendering, you canactually go back and look at that specific thing and see if you can make anadjustment so it renders faster.But as you can see right now, this is working perfectly fine, so I'm going toleave it alone and let it finish its render.Now that that's rendered, I just want to tell you one more thing.The RAM Preview in After Effects is awesome, and the new caching system for CS6is nothing short of a huge leap forwards.

But don't be afraid to step away from the desk and get comfortable with rendering.I mean sometimes, when you render a project, it's going to take a little while.So I seem to find that a short break and a cup of coffee is the perfect wayto shake things up and unlock your creativity while you're waiting for things to render.All right, well now that our render has finished, let's go to the Desktop and watch our QuickTime.I'll make this full screen and press the Spacebar, so you can see the fruits of our labor.

(video playing)

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